11/08/2009

10/27/2009

A woman checks her unemployment insurance over the phone at the California Employment Development Department office in Sacramento, CA. According to estimates from the National Employment Law Project, up to 600,000 Americans will have exhausted benefits provided by the Recovery Act by the end of October.

WASHINGTON – After weeks of political haggling, the Senate agreed Tuesday to take up legislation that would give people running out of unemployment insurance benefits up to 20 more weeks of federal aid.

Washington D.C. – Mr. President, currently the nation’s unemployment rate is higher than it has been since 1983. In my home state of Michigan, the unemployment rate is 15.3 percent – 5.5 percent higher than the nation’s unemployment rate of 9.8 percent. Translated into real people, this means that 15.1 million Americans are unemployed, of which, more than 740,000 are living in my home state.

Michigan provides a little more than 420,000 individuals with unemployment benefits. As of October 16, more than 44,000 Michiganders have exhausted much needed unemployment benefits and by the end of this year, this number will rise to almost 100,000 people. Since the beginning of this year, Michigan has been losing on average 27,000 jobs per month. Our people need help.

The Iraq war and President Bush have faded from voters' thoughts in the year since President Obama won the White House, leaving this year's Democratic candidates to justify $787 billion in stimulus spending despite lingering high unemployment and pushing a health care overhaul amid widespread voter skepticism.

Heading into next week's gubernatorial contests and special congressional elections, Democrats face an electorate whose good will and belief that an Obama-led party would be transformative have quickly evaporated even though the main issues seemingly are the same.

From California to New York, dominant themes are health care, Social Security, the weak housing market and misgivings about Wall Street bailouts. But for the first time in years, several polls show voters trust Republicans more than Democrats to better address the problems of the day.

For the past three weeks, Democrats in the Senate have been trying to quickly pass an extension of unemployment benefits for the growing number of long-term unemployed Americans, only to have their bill blocked each time by the Republicans. Earlier this week, Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid [D, NV] filed for cloture on the bill in an attempt to overcome the Republican-led opposition and move the bill forward towards becoming law. The vote on cloture, which will require 60 votes to pass and will put every member of the Senate down on record, is scheduled for Tuesday.

“On an issue like this that should transcend party labels, we had high hopes that Senate Republicans would stand with us. But the disturbing Republican trend of stonewalling any progress continues,” Reid said in a statement after scheduling the vote.

According to the National Employment Law Project, 400,000 unemployed Americans exhausted their unemployment benefits in September and another 200,000 will do so by the end of October. That averages out to 7,000 people per day reaching the end of their benefits in the face of an increasingly bleak job market.

One year after the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, Congress is still debating new financial regulations to protect consumers and prevent risk-taking in the financial sector. The House Committee on Financial Services is currently undertaking the important first step of writing, amending and voting on some of the pieces of the long-proposed financial regulatory reform. While debating these issues top committee members have been the recipients of disproportionate campaign contributions from the very industry that they are tasked with regulating.

10/26/2009

Mortgage giant Fannie Mae said this week that it will retire its HomeSaver Forbearance (HSF) program and replace it with a new Payment Reduction Plan (PRP), which will extend the benefit to investors and owners of second homes.

10/23/2009

CreditSights, which tracks the dismal data, predicts that in the current cycle, from 2008 through 2011, as many as 1,100 banks will fail. That would wipe out 13.4% of all U.S. banks, representing 7% of U.S. banking assets.